


vignette

by nonbinarynino



Series: after the fade. [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Blood, Blurple Hawke, F/M, Fade Demons, Hawke/Varric is vague in this one but comes into play later, Mage Hawke (Dragon Age), Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23399557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonbinarynino/pseuds/nonbinarynino
Summary: "You're going to die alone in here, and no one even gives a shit. No one is going to save you, either."-Hawke's nightmares in the Fade, after she's been left there to die.
Relationships: Female Hawke & Malcolm Hawke, Female Hawke/Varric Tethras, Hawke/Varric Tethras
Series: after the fade. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683352
Kudos: 16
Collections: Hawke/Varric





	vignette

**Author's Note:**

> First part in a 3+ part series.

The first thing that Hawke sees in the Hanged Man is Varric. He’s at the head of his table, like he always is, shuffling through some cards. “Hawke,” he crows upon seeing her, as if he has not seen her in a long time. Weirdly, even though Hawke is sure that she has seen him just within the past few days, it feels as though it’s been a long time for her as well. “Come sit. Did you just get back from the Bone Pit? You look like a high dragon just took a shit on you.”

Hawke looks down at herself - her robes are flawless, not a thread out of place, as if she’s never worn them before. Even her staff looks extra clean, like she'd just picked it up from a merchant stall this morning. Varric must just be feeling extra snarky. Perhaps the numbers on his bills have been a bit too intimidating lately. “No, I don’t,” she says. “Are you going blind with your old age? I fear I might need to find a new trusty dwarf. Perhaps Sandal is available. He can't disagree with me if all he says is _enchantment_.”

Varric laughs, good-natured, and gestures at the seat next to him. Hawke takes it, relaxing immediately as she sits down. There’s nothing quite like hanging out with Varric, even on the days where it feels like Kirkwall is falling apart around her. They can just drink and bitch until she feels like she can handle everything else. “Daisy ended up in the middle of the bad part of Darktown last night. Luckily one of my guys tipped me off before she got robbed," Varric tells her.

“Merrill can handle herself,” she points out. The seat that she’s sitting in doesn’t feel as hard as usual. Dare she say that it’s even _comfortable?_ Maker, maybe all this fighting has been good for her butt and that's why. It's definitely more plausible than the assholes who own this place buying anything new. “She’s just up in the clouds so much, it’s baffling she can breathe up there. When she knows when to fight, she’s bloody good at it. She makes deals with demons, like, once a week.”

“You say that as if that’s not a requirement for being in your entourage in the first place,” Varric replies. “The fighting part, not the demon part. If Fenris ever made a deal with a demon, I think all of Thedas would implode.” He thinks for a moment, and then adds, "You get in so many fights that I wonder why you even go outside. So many people want a piece of you, and not in the cheeky way."

Hawke smiles at him, even though she thinks that there's a lecture underneath his comment. It's kind of cute, since it means he cares. “It’s all part of the fun.”

Varric leans in close, as if his next words are going to be a confession or big secret. She leans in, too, mainly just to mimic him. “I have a question, Hawke.”

Something bundles up in her chest, a bit of nerves and excitement, too. She almost feels like this will change things between them - maybe he’ll even say what they’ve been leaving unsaid for a long time. She certainly would love to stop dancing around it. “Yeah?”

He opens his mouth wide, and his teeth are wet and red. He closes it again, the blood reaching his lips, dribbling down his chin. “Why are you so selfish? Why did you let Bethany die?”

Hawke’s blood runs cold, and she suddenly feels as though she may puke right on top of him. She leans back in her chair, as far away as she can get without leaving the chair entirely. “What?”

“You’re so _useless._ Nothing mattered. Nothing that you did ever mattered.” The blood runs all the way down his torso, and there’s so much of it, and then he’s coughing, hacking it all up. It hadn't seemed important before - the blood - but now it does.

“Varric,” she gasps, reaching over to help him. She touches his shoulders and the fabric is moist and warm. He flinches away from her, fixing her with this awful, horrible stare. Why does he hate her? What did she do to deserve this? “ _Varric_!”

His facial expression shifts _._ At first, she cannot even tell what he's going for with all the blood, but then she realizes. He's smirking at her. "You're going to die, Hawke," he tells her. His voice is something different now. It doesn't sound like Varric. It sounds as if he has not spoken the common tongue before, as if he is not used to it. "You're going to die alone in here, and no one even gives a shit. No one is going to save you, either."

And then he’s gone, the world’s gone, everything’s gone.

* * *

"Hawke, wake up! It's late morning now."

She grumbles, swatting at the intruder and rolling back over in bed. The blankets are so comfortable, so pleasantly warm - and she could stay here forever. She can deal with Kirkwall tomorrow. Ugh, she'll probably have some annoying letter from Athenril on her desk when she goes downstairs today. It'll go with the other ones, ignored, but they're still annoying to think about. "Five more minutes."

" _Wake up,_ dear _,_ " the intruder says, and now Hawke is awake enough to determine that the voice is clearly her mother's. "There's a man at the door for you. I think that you might have a suitor! He brought you some lilies."

Hawke jolts into a sitting position, immediately understanding the significance of the flower. She looks to see her mother and immediately gasps - because it's not just her mother. It's her mother the way that Hawke had last seen her - horribly pale, with the limbs of other dead women. There's not even any blood to seep from the wounds, because all her mother is now is a corpse. "No."

 _"No_?" Leandra repeats, clearly nonplussed. "Oh, so those were _not_ white lilies at the door? My, Hawke, I didn't realize that you were _such_ an expert for something that you had not seen! Should I go tell him that you are not interested?"

"No," Hawke says again, reaching out to grasp her mother's hands. They're cold and stiff. "Mother, don't go down there. Please. Just stay up here with me. I won't even be annoying."

"And why can't I go down there? There's a nice man waiting for you. He said that you had such a pretty face, dear."

Hawke opens her mouth to say _I have a pretty staff, too,_ but her mouth has stopped working. All she can say is "please stop."

"Are you afraid that he'll kill you the way that he killed me?" Leandra says, as if she takes such delight in the idea. She speaks now the same way she used to speak about evening dresses and tasty cookies. "That he'll take you apart and put the parts of other dead women in their place? Don't you want to be like your mother? Or are you going to sit in your dead father's shadow forever?"

Hawke's nose feels sensitive, like she's about to cry in that snotty, all-consuming way that she used to when she was younger. "I tried so hard to save you," she says. "I thought you knew that. Before you died, you _told me_ -"

"Perhaps I was just afraid of what you'd do to me if I told you the truth," is the reply, sounding more like one of Hawke's bullies from Lothering than her mother. "After all, _you're_ the one who let me die. Why did you let me get killed? In such a horrible way, too. It's all your fault. It will always be your fault."

Hawke's body moves on her own accord, her legs swinging over the side of her bed in a monotone fashion. She pulls herself up, reaches for the staff besides the bedside. _What am I doing_?

"There you go again," Leandra says, more exasperated than anything. "My failure of a daughter. It should have been you. Do you know how much I would have given to have Bethany and Carver with me here, instead of _you_? _Everything._ I would have given _everything._ "

" _Shut up_!" Hawke begs, in a voice that isn't her own. Her body isn't her own anymore, either. There's something possessing her now, something that she can't even name. She just _feels_ it. She just knows. Why hasn't she become an abomination yet? "Shut up, shut up, shut _up_!" Her hands take hold of the staff, aiming it at her mother. _I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this._

"My horrible daughter," Leandra says, but cannot finish. Hawke hurls lightning bolt after lightning bolt at her mother, watches the reanimated body jolt each time. After the fourth bolt, she slumps down to the floor, dead for real.

The staff falls out of Hawke's hands, clatters to the ground. "What did I do?"

_Sister-killer. Mother-killer._

* * *

The third nightmare is just a memory, unaltered.

“This one was constructed inside this village, closer to you than you might think,” Papa says, touching the staff gently before passing it onto Hawke. She grabs it with cake-greasy fingers, but it’s freezing to the touch, so she immediately places it back on the table. “It knows the Ferelden cold like no other, and will help you use that ice to your advantage.”

“I don’t like the cold,” she says, eleven years old and vastly interested in what her father is telling her. “Wintermarch is my least favorite month and I hate it.”

“But you like Wintersend,” Papa points out, though he clearly gets the point and moves the staff further away from Hawke, and bringing other staves closer. “Though I suspect that you just like to watch the tourneys, even though you tell your mother it’s because you like to celebrate the Maker.” He hands her another one, made of dark hardwood and taller than her. “Careful with this one. It can be a bit… volatile.”

Hawke reaches for it with both hands. It’s warm to the touch, just a little too hot to be pleasant. It’s not awful, though, so she maneuvers it in her hands, gets used to the way it feels. “It burns,” she says.

“Yes,” her father confirms. “All fire magic does. A warning of what its consequences can be.”

That sounds scary. Hawke slowly puts the staff back on the table. There’s one left - made out of a shiny metal, bent sharply at multiple points in a zigzag pattern. “Where’s this one from?”

“Emprise du Lion,” Papa says, in a dramatic little voice, as if he’s announcing the next song that a bard at a tavern will be singing. “Lots of old elven magic there, honey. Means this staff was crafted by powerful mages, and meant to be wielded by one as well.”

Hawke takes hold of it slower than she had grabbed the fire staff. This one gives her a little jolt, one that thrums through her entire palm. The longer that she holds it, she feels the energy go further into her arms, her body, until it even touches her heart, pulsing and tingling and -

“Electricity magic,” she announces, pleased with herself for being able to distinguish it just by the feel of the staff alone. She feels more awake than she had just moments before. “That’s the type of magic this staff is for.”

“Excellent,” Papa says, wearing his pride brightly on his face. “You take to it well.”

“I want this one,” she says, barely a breath, barely anything at all.

(It's one of her most cherished moments with her father, and yet, it hurts the most.)

* * *

Hawke's whole body hurts.

It's not just one type of pain, either. Her leg hurts in a sharp, bright kind of way, like a wound that's just been given to her. Her arms ache with a soreness that she has never quite felt before, not in all of her fights and squabbles and errands. But what hurts the most is her left eye, somehow a combination of the two. It throbs and it burns and it aches and oh, Maker, make it stop.

But the pain is a new feeling, and she realizes that she is no longer dreaming. She is _awake._ Looking around her, she's in the exact part of the Fade that she had fought the Nightmare demon in before it left her unconscious. How long has she been laying here, under his control? Weeks, months? Years?

The spider demon is nowhere in sight, now. All she can see are a few small spiders, even smaller than the ones she used to fight in the caves back home, crawling around near the rift. The _rift._ It's still here? The one that the Inquisitor and her friends had taken?

Something almost forgotten - hope - fills her chest. She doesn't know where Nightmare is: doesn't bloody care, really. Maybe it had thought her dead, or maybe it had decided that she'd suffer more alive. Whatever! Probably! Life is a struggle!

Hawke clambers to her feet, and the pain is harsher, now. She feels it on every inch of her body, everywhere. But it's okay. It's _okay._

"I'm gonna live," she says, just to herself. She looks around for her staff but cannot find it. It's not worth it. She doesn't need it. "I'm gonna _live._ "

She walks towards the rift with slow, agonizing steps. One of her legs will barely even _move,_ but there's no time to worry about that. "I'm gonna live."

She takes down the spiders with just the electricity from her fingertips, watches them drop onto their backs and die. It doesn't make Hawke feel any better or worse. It doesn't make her feel anything. "I'm gonna live."

Hawke approaches the rift, reaches out and touches it with the tips of her fingers. It feels like every magic that she has ever known. It feels like a song. "Oh my tits," she says, and laughs so hard that her body shakes and trembles. She stops only so that she won't fall on her face. "I'm gonna _live._ "

She doesn't take slow steps anymore. She pushes herself through the rift, eyes wide open so she'll be able to see what's on the other side, and -

It's Varric, bloody and smirking. It's Leandra, reanimated and cold. It's _Malcolm,_ just the way that she'd last seen him, soft-eyed and proud of her. There's nothing soft about the way they speak, though, all at once - "Did you really think you could escape me, Hawke?"

Perhaps the sad part is that she had thought that. She really, truly, had.


End file.
